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For the 2011 school year, UC Berkeley created a project for incoming students designed to break the social ice and spark intellectual debate among students and professors alike. Last year’s project, the “Saliva Experiment” asked students to send in samples of their saliva for genetic testing – which quickly led to national controversy. The results were ultimately withheld.

This year, however, the university decided on a less controversial, but similarly personal project. Instead of collecting spit, Cal is collecting voices. Because, like a thumbprint, every voice is unique.

At UC Berkeley, the number of international and out-of-state students is a growing population, a phenomenon that this year’s student orientation project is exploring. In a story co-produced by Melody Sage, Alexandra Victoria examines this closely.

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ALEXANDRA VICTORIA: We’ve all heard the stereotypes, but there’s actually something scientific about the way Californians talk that makes us sound different to everyone else.

KEITH JOHNSON: In California… The “ooo” vowel, like in “pool,” is said kind of with the tongue front-er in the mouth than in other parts of the U.S.

Linguistics professor Keith Johnson is an expert at distinguishing small – or big – differences in speech. Johnson says Californians use fewer vowels than people do in other parts of the United States. For example, if a Californian says something like, “A woman named Mary got married and was merry,” we’d hear:

JOHNSON: “Mary got married and was merry,” with all the vowels sounding the same. Much of the East Coast will have some kind of distinction among those words. They all get meshed together in California. So instead of saying “cool”, or you might say “kewl”.

This year, as part of freshman orientation, Johnson, with the help of a colleague, designed an interactive experiment where students could explore the linguistic diversity among their new classmates. It’s called “The Voices of Berkeley” experiment.

JOHNSON: This is a project where we were hoping to get information about our students, and be able to tie that back into, “Well, what’s your hometown? What language did you parents speak?” So that we have a little more information about California-ese.

Incoming students submit their voices anonymously, but their hometown location is identified on a map.

JOHNSON: So what we’re looking at is what we call the “class map.” This is a plot using Google maps that shows everyone who has participated in the project.

Nearly 10% of Berkeley’s 6,100-plus incoming freshman and transfer students participated in the project.

JOHNSON: So we then have regions of the world indicated with numbers that indicate how many people are from that region that we have on the map.

We met at the UCSF library where Johnson showed me some examples of the project on his laptop. The grey and blue map of the world is sprinkled with red, yellow, and blue dots – the colors refer to the concentration of participants they represent. When you zoom in, the dots disperse until they become independent, square voices bubbles, popping up from hometowns ranging from Phoenix, Arizona to Shanghai, China.

Johnson’s software analyzes the student voices and creates a visual representation of their unique speech patterns.

MELISSA ZALSUETA: I think that it’s really an interesting and great project.

Melissa Zalsueta is an incoming transfer student.

ZALSUETA: I like that it’s personal in how even though you think you don’t have an accent because you’re from California, you don’t think that you’re going to have a special kind of accent… You know they tell you, “Oh you know you have your accent; you’re special in your own way.”

Plenty of Berkeley’s students have a distinct accent. In fact, for 30% of them, English is a second language. This makes the school’s director of multicultural student development, Lisa Walker, very busy.

LISA WALKER: I think it’s incumbent upon us as a campus to become more comfortable and adept at language diversity as opposed to holding this unattainable or unrealistic standard that folks who come to this campus are going to all speak English in the way that we’ve been raised to speak English.

Like other campus faculty members, Walker is proud of the campus’ cultural and ethnic diversity. But she also worries about how changing enrollment priorities are transforming the voices being heard on campus.

WALKER: The question I have is, how are we doing as a campus in terms of what I believe is our first priority, which is educating Californians.

In 2010, the number of freshman from other countries jumped 41.7%, rising from 331 to 469 students. One of the main reasons is to make up for budget cuts that have dented the school’s funding. From a purely economic standpoint, the student body shift makes sense. Californians attending UC Berkeley pay a full freight of $15,000 for the usual cocktail of classes, health insurance, and other fees. Non-residents, meanwhile, pay closer to $40,000.

And those extra dollars make a big difference. For the 2011-2012 school year, state funding for UC Berkeley will constitute a mere 12% of the operating budget. Compared to 20 years ago, the state supplied 47% of the university’s budget. That’s made for some tough choices at UCB, and it’s led Walker to wonder who the school is there for.

WALKER: There are all different kinds of ways of looking at diversity, and certainly students who are coming to the campus in more numbers from outside of the state and other nations are contributing to our campus and bringing their experiences, perspectives, points of view and I think that’s all very good.

It’s a thought echoed by Sophomore Charlie Maggio.

CHARLIE MAGGIO: I love looking around campus and seeing people from all over. I grew up in California, born and raised, and I think the growing number of people from outside the state makes things more interesting.

WALKER: But for me I don’t want to lose that question of how are we doing in terms of representing the diversity right here in California. Because I think some of those slants on the diversity question also end up being about money. So who can afford to come here from out of state compared to students who come through the K-12 system in California and increasingly find themselves priced out of UC Berkeley.

Which is something that freshman Chris Thompson has seen first hand.

CHRIS THOMPSON: I think diversity is good, of course, but at the same time I was looking forward to going to school with some of my good friends from high school. One of them had really great grades, better than mine, and didn’t get accepted to Berkeley, I think in part because of the budget cuts.

So, more out-of-state students are soaking up enrollment spots than our fellow Californians. But Walker adds, without the additional non-resident fees, Berkeley would have to cut even more Californians. And the UC Berkeley Voices Experiment is literally marking the changes on a map.

So, has the increase in non-resident students shifted Berkeley’s average vowel space away from the Californian “ooo” in “cool?” Linguist Keith Johnson says it really isn’t that simple.

KEITH JOHNSON: Berkeley is a really diverse university with a lot of different people coming from a lot of different backgrounds, even among the Californians on campus … But California is a really diverse place and Berkeley sort of reflects diversity with a lot of linguistic diversity, both in accent and in native language background.

And we shouldn’t lose perspective; California is already a breeding pool of colorful cultural backgrounds, as seen in the Berkeley Voices experiment:

JOHNSON: One of the questions the students are asked to say is a math problem: “10 + 1 = 11.” We asked students to say that in their first language. People get to see that in Farsi, or Tamil, or Cantonese. When you visit the web page, you hear a lot of different languages. One of the striking things is that you listen to the voices on the web page. You’ll listen to a student from Fremont, and they sound like a prototypical Californian – until you get to the math thing. Then they say it in Farsi.

This story was co-produced by KALW’s Melody Sage. To learn more about the project, visit the Voices of Berkeley website.